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Progress on every
substantive issue I can think of is blocked, because every plausible
countermeasure threatens someone with substantive control over the
media. Net neutrality threatens the existing power structure by
making it easier for consumers to get information that is not
censored to minimize displeasing advertisers.

The early US was
built on citizen-directed subsidies of the media provided by the US
Postal Service Act of 1792. This encouraged literacy and reduced
political corruption. It's effectiveness declined in the late 19th
century with the growth of the advertising system for funding media.

Media biases created by reliance on advertising have created
obstacles to progress on virtually every front -- including creating
virtually every major potential enemy the US might face today on the
world stage. For example, for 80 years the mainstream media in the
US have largely suppressed discussions of questionable practices of
the Saudi royal family -- including the fact that the George W. Bush
administration insisted that 28 pages be redacted from the report of
the December 2002 report of the joint Committee of the US House and
Senate investigating 9-11. Recently declassified portions of those 28 pages showed that members of the Saudi royal family and
employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US helped some
of the suicide mass murderers of September 11, 2001, prepare for that spectacular form of guerrilla theater.

However, instead of
invading Saudi Arabia, the US invaded Afghanistan. The US denied an
Afghan request for evidence of Bin Laden's culpability, claiming it
was just a delaying tactic.

And after the invasion US international oil companies got a
pipeline the previous government had
not approved.

This
claim summarizes the key findings of Chenoweth and Stephan (2011) Why
Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict
(Columbia U. Pr.). This is discussed below along with other research
on the effectiveness of alternative approaches to conflict.

Nonviolent
resistance has been more successful than violence

Chenoweth
and Stephan developed a database of all the major governmental change
efforts1
of the twentieth century. Conflicts were selected for their database
using a consensus process involving leading researchers studying
conflicts. In this way they identified 217 movements that were
predominantly violent and 107 that were primarily nonviolent.
Outcomes were classified as either (1) failure, (2) partial success
or (3) success. The basic results are summarized in Table 1:
Nonviolence was twice as likely to achieve success as violence.

number of conflicts

percent(*)

Primary nature ->

violent

nonviolent

violent

nonviolent

outcome

failure

134

23

62%

22%

partial success

28

26

13%

25%

success

55

57

25%

54%

total

217

106

(*)
Percent within conflicts of the same primary nature. Thus, the
"violent" column percents add to 100. The nonviolent total
differs from 100 only because of round-off.

Table
1. Major governmental change efforts of the twentieth century by
dominant nature of the struggle (violent or nonviolent) and by
outcome (failure, partial success, success) in the NAVCO1.1 data set
compiled by Chenoweth and Stephan.2

Nonviolence
builds democracy; violence doesn't

However, the benefits of nonviolence over violence seem to extend beyond the
end of a conflict. Chenoweth and Stephan merged their data with the
Polity IV database, which includes ratings for governments of
different countries from -10 for
the worst tyranny to +10 for the best democracy.3
Table 2 shows the average increase in democratization from one year
before the start of a conflict to one year after. The results show
that win or lose, nonviolence tends on average to be followed by an
increase in the Polity IV rating while violence has essentially no
impact on democratization. Regression modeling (discussed in the
book) reveals a more complicated picture, but the overall message is
the same: As noted above, nonviolence builds democracy, while
violence perpetuates tyranny, on average, in the long run.

Violent

Nonviolent

failure

0.4

3.0

partial success

1.4

4.2

success

0.5

5.9

Table
2. Average increase in Polity score from one year before to one
year after a conflict. None of the changes following violent
campaigns are statistically significant while all the changes
following nonviolent campaigns are highly significant with
significance probabilities less than 0.001.4

Effective
use of air power

Robert
Pape (1996) Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Cornell
U. Pr.) compared air power
used to support ground operations with strategic bombing of
infrastructure and production facilities. He concluded that air
support of ground operations could be effective in defeating an
enemy, but strategic bombing was a waste.

Pape's
best known example was the 1940-41 London Blitz by which Hitler
attempted to bomb the English citizenry into submission. It
backfired. Before Hitler started bombing London, he had destroyed
most of the Royal Air Force on the ground. The British public didn't
like having their air force destroyed. However, the pain of World
War I was still vivid in the memories of anyone over 30, and few
British citizens were eager to repeat that disaster. After
Hitler started bombing London, the conflict became very personal.
The vast majority of British citizens supported Churchill's
commitment that, "We will never surrender."

Pape
claims that the results of other strategic bombing campaigns have
been similar though less obvious. He
argued that even the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945)
and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) played a minor role in Emperor
Hirohito's decision to surrender (August 14, 1945).5More
important was the speed of the collapse of the Japanese army in
Manchuria after the Soviets
entered on August 9, hours
before the nuclear
destruction of Nagasaki. Emperor
Hirohito mentioned the atom
bombs in his surrender message to the Japanese people on August 14.
However, in his surrender message to the military 3 days later, he
mentioned the Soviet invasion, not the atom bombs.6

Pape's
argument against strategic bombing rests on two claims: First,
strategic bombing often
hardens the will to resist of
civilians impacted. Second, infrastructure
destroyed is usually replaced by resources harder to destroy.

Pape's analysis was questioned by a
1999 RAND Corporation study funded by the United States Air Force.7Asubsequent multivariate
probit analysis of the RAND data supported Pape's assessment.8

More
recently Jeremy Scahill claims
that the US use of drones in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere manufactured enemies faster
than they were neutralized.9
This seems consistent with Pape's claims in Bombing to
Win. The discussion of the
Islamic State in Syria and the Levant (ISIL) in late 2014 suggests
that US military operations in Iraq and neighboring countries,
especially since 2003, may have been counterproductive.
This seems to support the
claims of Scahill and Pape.

What
motivates participants in conflict?

One
simple principle seems to explain the results described above:

When people are killed and property destroyed,

the apparent perpetrators often make enemies.

This
might seem obvious. However, when people feel threatened, they often
respond with violence in ways that are ultimately counterproductive.
Dunnigan and Martel
noted that many wars start small and grow.10 More research is needed
to understand the evolution of conflict: Why do people leave the
sidelines to support one side or the other? Why do people already
supporting one side increase or decrease their level of support? Why
do some defect?

Cheneoweth,
Stephan and others note that the risks and level of commitment
required to support nonviolence tend to be less than for violence.
People are also generally repulsed by violence perceived to be
excessive, especially against apparently innocent civilians or nonviolent protesters. Authorities
sometimes recognize this by using agents provocateur to create events
that can then be used to justify repression. More research is needed for two purposes: (1) To craft effective responses to specific challenges. (2) To
design military strategies that are more effective both in ending
current hostilities and in reducing the risks of future violence.

There
has been much discussion of the need to win hearts and minds in a
conflict. However, there has been little discussion of how to do
that. The results from Vietnam, Iraq, and elsewhere suggest that
it's hard to win people's hearts and minds by killing them.

1violent
and nonviolent resistance campaigns ending between 1900 and 2006.